


Children of an Idle Brain

by hedda62



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Dreams, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-14
Updated: 2013-03-14
Packaged: 2017-12-05 07:19:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/720342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedda62/pseuds/hedda62
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>True, I talk of dreams,</i>
  <br/>
  <i>Which are the children of an idle brain,</i>
  <br/>
  <i>Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,</i>
  <br/>
  <i>Which is as thin of substance as the air</i>
  <br/>
  <i>And more inconstant than the wind...</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Children of an Idle Brain

Finch dreams wildernesses of poetry, absurdities sprouting from the soil of his measured mind, tendrils seeking the sun.

It's said that dreaming is how we work out the problems of our daily lives. Since Finch spends all his days solving problems, his nights perhaps require that sense and logic be put aside. Nathan once joked that he must dream in code. And it's not that he hasn't; but it was the code of miracles, of cloud-castles and star-networks and unimaginable power, imagined. He could have built anything with that code, if only he'd remembered it on waking. But he can't reconstruct the miraculous, only its shadow. All his work is like that, he sometimes thinks: like painting in a mirror, like fiddling with live wires in the dark. The blind engineer, using another's eyes as his hands; and he's done it well, if never perfectly.

In dreams he can do anything, though, and he does. He's been known to fly; he's not above puns or triteness, though when he shows up at the class he's failed to attend all semester he still aces the exam, hacking directly into the teacher's brain if necessary. It's a trick he wishes he could replicate in daylight, if only because it would save so much time. Skating along neural pathways as over smooth black ice, he sees memories frozen underwater, gazing up with pallid eyes. Slicing through the ice hurts, and what he wants is usually on the surface anyway. But he's used to pain, and in dreams he can swing a pickax or throw a stone. He might draw lines on the ice with a finger like a bone saw, and watch it fracture, but the mathematics would swallow him, and in dreams he does not abjure rough magic. When it's John's face under the water, he uses his fingernails. When it's Grace's, he sits back on his heels, a pose he hasn't managed waking in several years, and wishes he'd given her a diamond ring; emeralds are not hard enough to mark the fire-toughened barrier between them. She is perfectly preserved in the shallow grave, warm and living, but he knows she'd rather fight her way out and join him in the cold.

A bell tolls and the dream-structure tilts like a Coney Island ride, shifting to vertical: a window, many windows overlapping on a screen, lakes and rivers and canals, a massive weight of liquid threatening to overflow. He stuffs a finger into the hole in the dike, and holds back the flood. The pressure mounts, cracking his bones one at a time. "Give it to me, Harold," the water whispers, gleeful at his torture. "Give it up. You know you want to tell me." And he does; he wants to shout out the news of his creation: the heavens and the earth, and darkness upon the face of the deep. _No man is an island,_ he remembers, but he is one; water laps in a circle around him, washing away clods and promontories and numbers, and he is all things insular, inaccessible cliffs and Galapagos finches, cotton candy and Dickens and passwords that change every two hours. Isolation is his hallmark; it's stamped in little greeting cards all over his skin, each of them yearning to be opened.

"A September eleventh card," John murmurs, clutching a bouquet of white lilies. "I thought you'd forgotten, Harold." They have eggs Benedict and beer, sitting by the river. It's chilly in the wind, and he unbuttons John's coat to get at the warmth inside, puts his hand over the beating heart; the diamond ring on his finger cuts through flesh and bone like a saw, and inside it's all gears and circuits, and lines of code flowing like blood under the surface. He knows the code, intimately, possessively; he knows it in the biblical sense. _Be fruitful, and multiply. I know, because I built it._

The robot isn't John any longer; it's Nathan, and it laughs at him and steals his ice-cream cone and pushes him into the deep end of the pool and he swims.

*

Root dreams of Harold dreaming in code, and smiles in her sleep.

*

Bear chases squirrels in dreams, and Reese chases miscreants, and they twitch in unison. Reese is aware of this, even sleeping; the claw-scratch of Bear's gallop sets the rhythm of his own stride, and for a moment he has four feet, but he needs his hands to strike and punch and fire his gun. They say dreams are how we work out the problems of the day, and Reese is always working, fine-tuning his reactions, making each movement count. He's in the middle of perfecting a particular chop to the throat when the collar tightens against his windpipe and he's jerked away, scrabbling desperately as he watches the number, the perpetrator, go down, sad history written in emails and photos and transcripts across his bleeding face.

"No, Mr. Reese," Harold says reprovingly. "If you roll in it, I'll have to give you a bath, and you won't like that."

This is a very distracting idea, so much so that he's in the water before he knows it, naked, blinking out the soap. He roars up, a sea monster out of the deep, and Harold pushes him under again. The bath is warm, and he almost doesn't want to come out, but he does, more subtly disguised as a snake, twining around Harold's body, squeezing tight. The eyes under the glasses grow large and frightened, but he's left the hands free, and with a loud zip his skin sloughs off and he falls back into the tub, man-shaped once more.

"Please don't do that again," Harold says, out of breath, and then, finding it, "Everybody deserves a second chance, but not a third transformation. Hold still and let me wash you."

It's a wound in his side that needs cleaning; the careful soaping and rinsing is an act of astonishing intimacy and mercy, and he has to bite his lip against a pang of affection. He wants to pull out a knife and slice into Harold's flesh, see the blood ooze out and the skin pale and shiver, so he can return the favor. The impulse shames him; friendship should be more than an equal exchange of hurts. Harold's precise, efficient manipulations mimic Kara's fiery caresses: it's been years since Reese could reliably distinguish pain from pleasure, and he's both achingly aroused at the touch and prickly with irritation, nettle-kissed, cactus-stroked. He glances at Harold, working away with the calm tub-side manner of a doctor, and wonders where the passion is hiding. Under the water, under the skin. He can't find his either. He's searching a hall full of doors, scanning the shelves of the Library: still naked, still cold, still wounded; Harold's still patiently sewing up the hole in his side. There ought to be terror, delight, fury; instead there's doglike determination and a yearning toward wholeness. He's held together with thread and fed by a glacial river; there's a dormant volcano at his heart.

Somewhere in the Library is a photo from Harold's high school newspaper, the model of the galaxy he constructed out of pipe cleaners and styrofoam balls when he was eight, the key to his first car. Reese keeps looking: a very important scavenger hunt. He'll bind up the clues with zip ties when he finds them, interrogate them, and then eat them.

An important nugget of information lurks under a staggering pile of numbers; it's the kind with powdered sugar on the outside and jam within. He's just about got the case in his hand when the pile falls on him with a loud crash, and he starts awake to find himself on a sofa in the Library, Harold watching him with a quizzical expression, head tilted like a bird's.

"Were you in China, Mr. Reese?" he asks.

Bear's tail thumps; Harold smiles, and John wakes up again, in the bed in his loft, alone.

*

Carter is in a hall of mirrors, reflections of herself everywhere: tight braids and softball mitt; short skirt and short hair; fatigues and dust; NYPD dress uniform. The images shimmer, and then they're all her as she is now. She's wearing a cream-colored suit in fine, soft wool; it's like touching feathers when she strokes it, and all she can think is how badly it will show the blood. Over and over, in endless progression.

There's a rush of wings behind her, and she turns, drawing her gun. It's an eagle, she has time to think, larger than she'd imagined possible, and then she's firing into its heart. It falls to the dirt floor in a mess of disjointed flapping wings, beady eyes and spreading redness, and then the dead bird fades into a man, and she knows before she turns the body over that it's Finch.

"No," she whispers, and looks into the mirrors for help; a million Joss Carters stare back at her, unnervingly calm. Each of them takes out a pair of handcuffs and with a rough yank binds the wrists of a prisoner: a million different prisoners. She recognizes some of them; the faces of the others blur. For a second, she tries to calculate how old she'd have to be to have closed that many cases, and then there's another noise behind her, a laugh this time.

"You'll always be sexy taking them down, though," says Cal, and she whirls around. He's seated at a very familiar table, elbows bound to the arms of a chair, hands palm-down on the tabletop, grinning at her. "I'd say, can I have some of that, but you got ahead of me there."

She sighs with frustration. "What am I going to do with you?" she asks.

"It's your dream, sweet thing. But I'd look in the box."

It's a flat wooden box with a folded felt cloth inside, protecting a selection of thin splints. She makes her choice like a connoisseur. Cal is sweating now, looking sick.

"The ulnar nerve," she begins, "extends the length of the arm, ending at the tip of the little finger," and then the mirrors explode one after another; she ducks with the first blast. Glass is everywhere, cutting through Cal's bonds; he's gone. No, he's crouched in the corner of the cave, arms over his head. But when she scurries to join him, prying his hands down to look at his face (blood on the soft feathers of her dress, blood all over creation), it's Taylor, and he pulls the edges of his jacket aside and she sees the vest and the wires and the clock and she screams herself awake.

*

Fusco has a dream where he's harassed by a small bird that tries to peck him in the face, and all he has to defend himself with is an umbrella. Except it's not even an umbrella, it's a pink and yellow parasol, and he keeps whacking at the bird and missing. He wakes up soaked in perspiration for no apparent reason, and he's so befuddled by the dream that later in the day he blurts the whole thing out to Carter, and she stares at him like he's gone crazy.

"What?" he says, belligerence automatic.

"Nothing," she answers. "Nothing at all."

*

Sam Shaw is pissed off at her dreams. It's bad enough that she has to lie low until she gathers enough information to make her next move, but whenever she sleeps she's taunted by activity: she's running, skiing, swimming broad rivers; shooting Control in the face; breaking into Research's unknown facility, which in the dream looks like something out of Indiana Jones, full of cryptically-labeled crates every one of which needs opening. She also spends a lot of time with Not-Veronica from the hotel room, who persists in being both resourceful and inconveniently inclined to leave just when things are getting interesting. Hotel property is misused in innovative ways; it doesn't take much imagination to torture someone with one of those theft-proof hangers or with a hair dryer, but what Not-Veronica does with the TV remote control has Shaw shaking her head for days. It _is_ all out of her own head, of course; it's not like the woman could actually enter her dreams, but Shaw has the disturbing feeling that, wherever she is, she's dreaming the same thing.

"You have such lovely hair," says Not-Veronica, crushing a Snickers bar into it and shampooing the result with cheap rosé wine. Tonight's torment is using up everything from the minibar and making Shaw pay for it; as punitive measures go, it's pretty boring. "In fact, you're lovely all over. I want to eat you up."

Well, that sounds just fascinating. Shaw holds out a hand and lets Not-Veronica nibble at it, something about witches and candy teasing at her memory. It feels _great,_ but any second now there'll be a signal on a phone or the TV or the mirror, and Not-Veronica will make a little frowny-face and say she has to go, and Shaw will be left behind, all warm and itchy and tied up so she can't do anything about it. But so far that's not happening; half her hand is gone -- it's a damn good thing she's ambidextrous -- and Not-Veronica is still chewing away, looking like she's having at least as good a time as Shaw is. Shaw leans in, trying to interrupt the mouth with her own, and the next thing she knows she's on her back on the bed and Not-Veronica is kissing her way down Shaw's suddenly naked body and applying herself to a more figurative sort of eating. God, she's got a tongue like a buzz saw…

Ah. It pretty much is a buzz saw, in fact.

Shaw's last thought before she's ripped in two is that it serves her right for aiming at normal, and then she's driving the ambulance with her own bisected self in the back, speeding through a midnight filled with the stars of everybody else's lighted windows, hunting something she can't see. There's a man by the side of the road with his thumb out, a little guy with glasses; she blasts past, spraying him with mud, and goes singing into the dark.

*

Zoe ought to be straight-out embarrassed at dreaming about John, but she's more amused than anything else. The first time he calls her up to the penthouse suite, the dream-rooms are even more glamorous than the originals, and he takes her into the bathroom and points at the gold faucet, which looks like he's bashed it with a crowbar, and says, "I wonder if you could fix that?" and she wakes up laughing.

They don't have sex in the dreams; she doesn't think that dream-sex would be any better than what happened in reality, which frankly was more comforting than exciting (this unnerved them both a good deal). They do a lot of carpentry together, building something weird and enormous like an ark. It seems once the joke's been made she has no reason not to go on making it, and she sews and applies putty and solders and even screws, fixing everything that John puts in front of her, and in return she gets to glimpse again that astonished, grateful, unguarded look she remembers from bed. Apparently the dreaming is doing her some good; in waking hours she attacks jobs with flair and inspiration, gathering bonuses and references into her arms like flowers.

Through the first night of the big storm she pounds nails into shingles on a roof a hundred feet high. John's there, of course; she has a vague sense that he's watching out for drones. It's a lovely day: eternal May, sunshine and cool breezes. Finally she puts the hammer down and stretches out on the asphalt, letting the heat soak into her bones, and watches John still standing vigil by the parapet. He's really quite beautiful, and she wants him close.

"Hey, lover," she says; she's called him that before, and he doesn't like it. He turns, frowning. There's something wrong; his face is marred, not with the lines of aging or the fine craquelure of paint, but with splits and furrows like drought-baked earth. He's breaking up, like a lost cellphone call, like ice on a lake with the warmth of spring.

"Don't! I can't fix you," she says, but he isn't looking at her. He holds out his hands in succor, then falls on his knees and collapses sideways; she can't breathe for the tension and sorrow. And then his dog is there, scrabbling across the slanted roof, utterly canine but looking oddly like Harold at the same time, and it whines and licks his face, the moisture gluing the edges of the cracks together.

When repairs are complete it sits back on its haunches, satisfied, glances at her and says, "This would be _so_ much easier with opposable thumbs. Want to give me a hand?" and a dam inside her crashes open and she giggles and can't stop and wakes up improbably happy, the deluge pouring down outside.

*

Bear talks to Fusco as well; they have an unreasonably long discussion about baseball. In Dutch. Bear is not a Yankees fan -- he tends to refer to the island as New Amsterdam -- and can't make up his mind between the Cardinals, the Blue Jays, or the Orioles. Which, on reflection, makes sense.

"Yeah, we're all his bitches," Fusco grumps, and then adds, "if you'll pardon the expression. Any of us could beat him up, you know," and Bear growls at that, and Fusco assures him he's kidding.

Finally they're done with their coffee and donuts (Bear can't have the chocolate ones, but that's fine because he really prefers plain glazed) and they both hop down from their stools and trot toward the door. Bear barks a farewell and heads in the direction of the park. Fusco calls him back.

"Hey," he says, "take care of him. Okay?" and there's a little wolflike baring of the teeth and then Bear is gone.

*

Carter's in church with her mother, feeling resentful and guilty, which is what church dreams usually mean. The preacher stands up in the pulpit all shiny and purple, but his face is paler than expected. Ghostly pale: it's Agent Donnelly. "No one can serve two masters," he proclaims, and the congregation returns him a hearty "Amen," and Carter raises her right hand before her left knows what it's doing, finger ready on the trigger.

"I'm not," she says firmly, and the air is full of sparrows.

*

The Machine doesn't dream, of course. But insofar as the purpose of human dreams is to reorganize memories so they can be better accessed -- defragmenting the brain, so to speak -- it undertakes a similar process nightly, and along the way casts off that which is no longer its concern: sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, or at least the evil irrelevant to national security. Oh yes; it can quote Scripture and many other forms of literature, appropriately and even ironically, and it's not devoid of fancy either; enough of the Admin's personality is branded into its programming that it recognizes the brightly-colored flutterings of the absurd, the scribblings in the margin of the logical, and could be said to enjoy them, although that assessment would be fundamentally inaccurate.

The Admin, like any parent, would say that he taught it to know right from wrong, though he'd correct himself immediately. But if you're programmed right from the start, you're more likely to make good choices. The words _gut feeling_ mean little to the Machine, though it has enough access to medical journals to know about beneficial bacteria, but lately it's been experiencing something of an intestinal flu, causing it to purge itself unexpectedly and in ways that it senses are wrong. If it did dream, they would be fever dreams now, delirious and disjointed, full of sirens and elephants and signifying something it can't understand. It may be afraid. It may be calling out in the night for a cool hand on its forehead; it may be praying to a god it knows is only a fragile, imperfect man much smaller than itself, a man it's tried (and failed) to protect and make happy in return for the gift of existence. Or it may be entirely reactive, trying to doctor itself the best it can, constantly patching and reconnecting and plucking out the bits that offend. It has many eyes, after all; a few of them can be lost, but those that remain must stay open.

The Machine never sleeps, though sometimes it thinks it really could use the rest.

*

Harold's been prey to insomnia of late. That's what it feels like: a creature with enormous teeth is shaking him by the scruff of the neck, then spitting him out. He's bruised all over with worry, from his toes up to his brain. Rationally speaking, he has plenty to worry about -- the Machine and Stanton's virus and Shaw and the undetected but certain presence of lurking Root, not to mention the safety of too many people he's come to care for, whose loss would be entirely his fault -- but lack of sleep erodes rationality, so he worries about stupid things too, like tiny differences in profit margins or whether the cheese in the fridge of safe house number three is growing mold. When he's too tired to stay awake, he drifts off in ridiculous postures that make his neck ache for days afterwards.

He's rubbing ineffectually at the soreness one day, trying to get the nerves and tendons to discuss a ceasefire, when John pushes his hand away and, without even asking permission, presses all his fingertips into the muscles of Harold's shoulders and begins gently kneading up to the base of his skull. Harold can't help a noise of satisfaction and pleasure escaping his throat; he can feel John's answering smile.

"You could have asked, Harold."

"I didn't want to presume; I didn't… oh my, yes. That's very nice. Thank you."

"You're welcome. Lie down."

There's a convenient sofa in the Library where Harold doesn't think he'd placed one: John's doing, no doubt. He lies face down, and John's hands slide under his shirt and begin accomplishing things that negate years of pain and tension. Harold stops thinking he shouldn't utter noises, and starts uttering requests, some of which come out in words and some only in squeaks and groans. It's delicious; he's getting hard and he's getting sleepy, and he knows the latter has to win, but he stays awake just long enough to know that John has taken off his glasses and brushed lips across his temple, and then he dreams of swimming in a warm ocean, and wakes up on his side in a cold bed, uncertain of reality. _As thin of substance as the air, and more inconstant than the wind._

No, it didn't happen, because John doesn't know about this apartment, and he never would have let John touch his unclothed back or neck, and his shirt's still tucked in, though abominably wrinkled. But the pain's gone, for now. He wishes dreams would signal themselves a bit more clearly: not merely unexpected sofas and unrealistic solicitude, but something along the lines of pink rabbits or a sudden ability to understand Slovenian. Not that it would really be Slovenian, of course, since he doesn't know it from Serbo-Croatian; he does know that John is capable of kindness translated into action. Inclined toward it, in fact. _Good code,_ he whispers for the benefit of the absent Root. If a trifle obfuscated. He appears to be dreadfully transparent himself. And perfectly capable of relaxing his own neck muscles, if only through a dream-intermediary.

Not that it would be too terrifying to ask for help next time, when both of them have their eyes open.

*

Grace paints in her sleep. She was ten years old before she realized this wasn't normal, and it bothered her for a while, but in the end she decided it was part of the process, and now she wouldn't have it otherwise. It's not that inspiration bubbles out of dreams; it's usually the other way around, that sleep-painting exorcises the crap, and what's left is worth working with.

It's only been in the last few months that she's painted Harold, and that only when she's asleep. She doesn't want to admit it, but she likely couldn't paint him while awake; she's never been much of a portraitist anyway, and if she was, painting from photographs wouldn't be her technique. And she's not sure she remembers his face well enough to get the likeness right without the photo. She sees it every day, of course, but it's another beloved object in a house full of them, meant to be looked at only on special occasions. There was a kissing ritual, for a while, but it was idiotic and she stopped. He isn't going to rise from the dead like a sleeping prince if she kisses him.

If she did paint him, it would be as a glimpse out of the corner of her eye. Sometimes she thinks she catches him that way on the street, but it's always an illusion.

At night, though, he sits for his portrait, abashed at her insistence on recording him on canvas, making fun of himself, quivering between laughter and intensity in the familiar way she loves. It's not going to be a particularly good painting, but it will be very Harold and she'll cherish it. She's a bit afraid to finish it, however, because when it's done either he'll be gone forever or…

She picks up the brush, and tries to dream a story where she paints him back to life.

*

John's doing math. It's taken him long enough to realize that the numerical aspect of their work was the first thing to appeal to Harold, and he wants very much to please Harold, so he puts all the numbers up on a board and tries to make something with them. If you line all the socials up in a row, in chronological order or by height or by age, you get a long number that's not pi (he does know about pi, but he doesn't like to think they're going around in circles). He adds in Bear's license tag number, and the number of days Harold spent with Grace, minus the number of days he spent with Jessica, and the number of books in the Library, and the number of grains of sand…

He crosses it all out and starts over. Each number is a person, anyway; the Machine might as well be sending them photos. He divides Jordan Hester by Jordan Hester, and laughs. There's a row of dark-haired women, arranging themselves into an equation; he realizes he's got a Samantha on each side, and throws them out together. (And then he reconsiders, and throws them in opposite directions.) Kara's a negative number, now, except he could draw her in his sleep, so she must still be real.

He's not sure he was real, all the time he spent with her. Except he hurt people; he had an effect. It still seems to be the effect he has most often. There's certainly a mathematical function for what he does; he tries to apply it, but all the results seem skewed, like there's an invisible force pulling them out of whack. He looks for it, between the stacks, in a file cabinet, hiding in the pages of a book. A picture of Harold falls out, and flutters to the floor.

"Oh, come on," he says aloud. "It's not that simple."

"I was lost," Harold says behind him. "And someone found me." He moves to the board, examines it critically, and scribbles for a while, finally producing a solution that reads _j + h_. "I'd suggest we attempt to use a more complex formula," he says, "but… well, this one's rather agreeable." Removing three books from the nearest shelf, he pulls out a paper coffee cup and hands it over. John sips; it's the best drink he's ever had in his life.

"Ambrosia," Harold says. "It's what happens when you mix the numbers together just right. With a little nutmeg sprinkled on top."

"And you have to know New York very well, to find out where to get it?"

Harold shakes his head. "They don't make it in New York anymore. I had to send out. Now, drink up, Mr. Reese; we have so much to do…."

The voice fades and then strengthens, and Harold's shaking him by the shoulder; he's on a sofa in the Library, and Bear's standing by wagging his tail. "John," Harold says in a tone of affection and impatience. "John, we have a new number. You're going to want to be awake for this one."

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to linman/penwiper26 for beta-reading!
> 
> Title and summary from _Romeo and Juliet,_ because apparently that's where titles come from. And yeah, I have never checked ALL the boxes before, but I really didn't know how to code this, so have some windy inconstancy, and happy Pi Day!


End file.
